Corsair raptor k40 keyboard and m45 mouse are designed to provide
best-in-class features and performance for gaming click now to learn more
valve in-home streaming uses the power and compatibility of a Windows-based
gaming pc somewhere in the house to enable a great
gaming experience on other devices and operating systems basically anything
that can run the steam client Windows os x or Linux can use it as long as the
hardware is powerful enough it works on inexpensive desktop pcs notebook pcs or
even tablets so what does it do first of
all it's in beta so all of this is subject to change but the basics should
be pretty much set at this point so here you go in home streaming uses your
gaming machine with a powerful graphics card for example your office or your man
cave rig to act as the server and to run
a demanding game then with as little latency as possible convert that to an
h.264 compressed video stream it then sends that video stream over your home
network to another machine for example your home theater pc that's hooked up to
your tv which acts as a client that can
without working very hard decode that video stream and display it on the
screen at the same time the client pc
takes input commands from your game controller or keyboard and mouse and
again latency is key here sends them back to the server to actually control
the game the idea is that any pc with
adequate network performance and CPU horsepower can let you play your games
the games on your gaming rig remotely so what does it not do it does not allow
streaming over the internet although i suspect workarounds for that won't be
much of a stretch for the technically inclined it does not allow multiple
people to use the server or streaming machine at the same time so your office
gaming pc can't have someone sitting at it working on spreadsheets while you're
using the horsepower of that GPU to game downstairs it will actually be running
the game on screen at the same time just like NVIDIA's game stream technology
number three it does not allow logging in from multiple locations on the same
network to the same account and playing different games at the same time we'll
need steam family sharing for that which is hopefully coming soon number four it
does not allow higher resolutions than the connected monitor of the server pc
the game must run on both pcs at the same time so if your desktop computer
has a 720p monitor and your tv downstairs is 1080p then your stream
will be limited to 720p the good news is
that the opposite is not true so as long as your gaming pc has the same or higher
resolution as the other pc your remote pc can scale that image down
appropriately number five is it's a little bit finicky right now and it does
not have perfect game compatibility in the future i'd expect this to be much
improved and you should be able to stream most of the games in your steam
library even the ones that you've added manually number six
it does not deliver the greatest image quality it's seemingly capped at about
30 megabits per second maximum streaming bit rate so that means color depth will
be lower which is perceived as blockiness and what would otherwise be
smooth color transitions and it also introduces artifacts some that are
difficult to notice and some that are very very easy to notice such as these
around a crosshair in battlefield bad company 2. moving on to hardware
requirements valve has been pretty tight-lipped about these probably
because this functionality just went into beta and they are still working on
it but there are a few things that we know CPU performance will have to be
enough to decode and play back an h.264 video stream at whatever frame rate and
resolution you're running officially valve supports 720p and 1080p at either
30 or 60 FPS network performance also matters but how
many megabits or gigabits per second it can achieve is not actually the most
important thing connection latency and reliability are much more critical than
throughput a theoretically faster n or
even ac wireless connection will inherently drop more frames than a
normal Ethernet or even a slow power line network connection because hardline
networking performance is much less susceptible to interference speaking of
interference forget about 2.4 gigahertz and wireless even if the throughput is
fast enough there's so much interference on that frequency that 720 30 FPS isn't
a great experience five gigahertz wireless n was much better in my testing
but that's a subject for another video stay tuned for a follow-up where we take
a closer look at network requirements the other requirement is the pc actually
doing the gaming has to be powerful enough to run those games that's kind of
a given all of this aside so we don't really know exactly what we need if you
are trying in home streaming and you're wondering how your configuration is doing pressing f6 on the client pc
provides a somewhat useful little analysis bar that drop pops up and tells
you latency drop frames and stuff like that i didn't always find that the
numbers correlated directly to the gaming experience i was having though so
your mileage may vary but at least it's in there so let's move on to the
practical demonstrations obviously if you have two powerful gaming rigs you
could stream between them but gaming locally would usually make more sense in
this case so i'm gonna focus on some demos for you guys that show how i think
this technology will be used here's demo number one i'm using a Linux in this
case steam os machine to run a game that doesn't natively run on Linux
boom your entire Windows game library now runs on a modestly powerful Linux
box no excuse not to try it now hey in this case this is batman arkham origins
running at 1080p 60fps and here's demo
number two this old low-cost low-power
sapphire machine has an AMD e450 dual core apu with
integrated graphics in spite of its age and lackluster performance i can have a
console grade gaming experience that is to say 720p 30fps with no frame loss
while playing the latest games in this case i've got battlefield bad company 2
running here but that was just for the sake of you know mixing up our games a little
bit here's demo number three this is a thin and light notebook with integrated
Intel graphics and i love thin and lights they're portable there's this one
there's this one this one can work as a notebook or a tablet it's super lightweight but like
many people i had to make the decision between portability
and gaming performance not anymore here it is running bioshock infinite at 1080p
30fps this is wirelessly and the experience isn't perfect but if you have
a usb to Ethernet adapter even this one right here a dual core ultrabook was
able to stream at 1080p 60fps
very very impressive now we're getting
into experimental territory demo number four is ifinity three by 1080p it didn't
work with lots of games and it was more of an exercise in
pushing the limits rather than trying to deliver a great gaming experience but it
worked it's not fantastic latency feels
noticeably higher and the frame rate especially when moving around
consistently can't go above about 20 FPS
which is interesting because we're at three times the resolution of 1080p so
being only able to achieve 20 FPS or one third of 60fps the maximum allowable
value in the valve settings looks like it may be an artificially imposed
limitation one that valve could unlock in the future by giving us higher bit
rates for higher resolution streaming
the grand finale our most elaborate test setup yet we have two
4k tvs one with our Radeon r9 290x
gaming machine and the other with my pretty run-of-the-mill i mean it's a gtx
670 so it's pretty decent but this is with my steam machine you can see
they're connected ncix was generous enough to let us come and tear apart two
stores to get access to these two 4k tvs run Ethernet cables between two
neighboring stores but we are pretty much ready to find out if this is going
to work so we are setting we are limiting our resolution to the desktop
resolution which happens to be 3820
by 2160 so that's 4k which obviously
isn't a setting that we can actually you know
set here so we're going to set our bandwidth to unlimited our frame rate to
automatic and we're going to find out if this works i've been working on this for
about an hour and a half we're trying to get this set up so let's fire up portal
2 and see if it flies
not defeated yet but we discovered an issue and that is that the NVIDIA
graphics card in here with the Linux drivers that it has to run because this
is running steam os does not support a 4k output over HDMI
yet so we switched to a Windows machine we tried to use mini displayport to
active dual link hd or dvi to HDMI and
it showed up as a selection in the resolution options but then the tv spat
that out so conveniently we're at ncix and we have another notebook sitting
right here and we are now installing steam we're running at 4k on that one so
we're gonna find out if this is actually going to work very shortly it's working
i actually we uh we shot in the dark
we went and fired up batman and it's working capturing 3840 by 2160
at around 20 oh my goodness it just dipped down to 14 frames per second now
something i'm a little bit concerned about is the link utilization here it's
telling me 21 of estimated and it's not going above 100 megabit per second so
i'm wondering if we might have a slower than gigabit connection for some reason
if we might have a bad Ethernet cable or something like that but i'm going to go
ahead and confirm these changes and we are definitely running at 4k
resolution now the the bit rate is not
really enough to sustain it properly
you can tell it's quite blocky but in terms of sheer resolution
it's running so there you have it guys
batman arkham origins running in 4k
over the network using steam in-home streaming is it a perfect experience
absolutely not it's leggy as all balls right now
and uh the the low bit rate so it's about 32
megabit even when we're maxing everything out we're running at 4k it
makes it look not nearly as good as if you're actually sitting right in front
of it but the fact that it works at all
just shows such promise for this technology in the future and when you
consider as well how functional the 1080p version is and how low latency
that is and how we're going to see better network connections and faster
processors on either side in the future i think it is just so exciting and
there's so much promise for this technology so thanks guys for checking
out our steam in-home streaming video don't forget to subscribe to Linus tech
tips for unboxings reviews and other computer videos and thanks again to ncix
for letting us come in here and borrow their two 4k tvs to try this out
you